Chapter 1
Chapter 1
The mountain breeze was cool under the shade of mahogany trees that lined the road. The sky overhead was blue, framed by fluffy white clouds.
It was a lovely day for a picnic.
Except there was no picnic. There was, however, the roar of a V6 engine, mingled with the obscenely loud bars of an online radio's ska-punk/core channel.
The engine belonged to a car that was going at a perilous speed over the unpaved mountain pass, leaving behind it a spray of dust and loose earth. Once an impeccably restored 1994 Mitsubishi Galant Ultima, the car was the specter of dereliction: scratches, a nasty dent on the hood, mud stains all over the body. Music blasted through its open windows, sending birds of vibrant colors fleeing the low-hanging branches as it passed.
The driver had draped her right arm by the window, a lit cigarette nestling between her fingers. She was switching between the wheel and the stick with her other hand.
Her phone, which was mounted on the cracked windshield against LTO regulations, suddenly lit up. "Fuck!" The driver winced as her phone's Bluetooth connection tripped and her music was replaced by the phone’s Noises ringtone.
Ears tingling, she put the car to a skidding halt and looked at the screen. Mamita Calling, said the notification. The driver paused, thinking about whether she ought to pick up. Seconds went by. Then she ended her mother's call without answering and put the car into gear. Almost immediately, the phone reconnected with the oversized double speakers on the back seat, and the shrill drum intro of Marching Round in Circles by Sonic Boom Six blasted her from behind. The car took off with a squeal. "Fuck!!!"
A few minutes later, the screen lit up again, this time with a text message. "MIA ANSWER YOUR PHONE DONT IGNORE YOU..."
Mia, as the driver was called, drove on. "Sorry, Mom," she shouted as she ignored the notification on the screen.
Six months earlier, bored out of her mind, Mia Santos decided to move away from the big city, away from her friends, away from her family, and head for the mountains. Like all good spur-of-the-moment adventurers, she diligently scoured Google Maps for a suitably remote settlement. She had thought everything through. She wanted a place that had a stable supply of power and water. Working as a virtual assistant at a staffing firm, her company laid down specific guidelines that her Internet connection be wired and that signal-based devices weren't allowed—rules that she pooh-poohed. This far out in the mountains, she was still hitting 4G signal speeds on her phone.
Mia turned the volume down as she passed the village hall of her destination, Barangay Ugdin. This remote mountain village was going to be her home for the next six months—"maybe forever," Mia had told her friends over drinks, ignoring their drunken laughs and admonitions of being a "crazy bitch."
Mia drove around the village, trying to get a feel for things. It was a small community, indeed smaller than she expected, and no bigger than the exclusive village to the south of Manila where she used to live.
She also noted how the village was laid out like a tiny city: there was a wide central park, surrounded by the old village hall, a padlocked ancient chapel, and a mostly deserted marketplace. This was the first thing Mia noticed about the market; she had hoped to do a little shopping for dinner. "What do you expect?" She could just then hear her friends poking fun at her. "You're moving to the middle of nowhere. And for what???"
Unlike other provincial villages that had houses spread far and wide, houses in Barangay Ugdin were clustered around the village center, as if everyone was anxious to live under the bells of the old, crumbling chapel. Driving slowly, Mia turned at a street adjacent to the chapel, mentally counting off each house on the street. Her landlady, a sketchy old food vendor in the one open stall in the market that day, had been equally sketchy in giving instructions: "It's the seventh house from the corner facing the church! You can't miss it."
There were only twelve houses on the street the lady had indicated. Upon reaching the seventh house, Mia breathed a sigh of relief. Could this be it? she thought. The seventh house from the corner facing the church was a single detached bungalow with a nicely tended garden...and it was obviously owned by someone else.
Eventually, Mia found the house.
"It's the house with a staircase in front, on the other side of the block from where you were," the old lady at the marketplace rasped at her, facing the other way. Mia just noticed but Manang Luz had a lazy left eye. "Also, that chapel is obviously closed for good so that wasn't the church I mentioned. I meant Apong Pilay's church, the wooden one with two floors and a roof garden! It's on the other end of your street."
No kidding.
Still, things were looking lovely. The house had a softwood exterior lining, giving the impression of a colonial cottage. The inner walls were poured concrete. The floor was four steps above ground level; a stairway led to a small garage for her car, halfway underground.
Despite the raspy voice, her landlady, Manang Luz, had graciously closed her stall's prop-up window and offered to accompany Mia to the house when Mia came back a second time asking for clearer directions. "My child, what have you been smoking in here?" Manang Luz rasped as she climbed into the car. "I smoke tobacco rolls myself, but I never leave my ashes on the floor! Okay?"
Mia looked at the lit cigarette between her fingers, her fifteenth for the day. It's only five in the afternoon and she had almost finished an entire pack. She was now averaging one pack per day.
She was sitting alone in the dying daylight at the kitchen table, a cup of brewed coffee in front of her, steaming beneath the froth. "This is probably how I'm going to die," Mia thought. Smokes and coffee—an old call center trick she learned to keep herself awake all night. It had been a while since she worked a night shift, but her old habit persisted.
Outside, one cicada started to chirp, joined by another, and another, and another. Soon the entire mountain rang and echoed in one loud, prolonged song. Meanwhile, the sounds of children playing in the streets competed with street food sellers calling out their wares. Mothers were gathered outside, calling home their kids while engaging in last-minute chats before going home to prepare the family dinner. All the while, the song of the cicadas built up to a crescendo.
Then suddenly, on an incredibly perfect cue, the cicadas stopped.
Somewhere, a mother's baby was crying.
Mia laid a hand on her belly. A tear silently rolled down her cheek. It had been a while.
